[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West. You are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show. America, land of the not really free? Do you know about the shadow docket? National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude.
[00:00:33] Happy to have you along, my fellow Americans. I'm Sam Bushman. Hard-hitting news that I always refuse to use, no doubt, starts now. Lowell Nelson with me, well known for CampaignForLiberty.org, doing a phenomenal job. He's the Utah State Coordinator. They say interim, but when you've been there for a certain amount of time, it becomes kind of a de facto reality, ladies and gentlemen. You know when somebody lives with a partner for a long time, their common-law married? This guy's the common-law coordinator of...
[00:01:05] I'm going to call it Ron Paul Institute and CampaignForLiberty.org. Welcome back, Lowell. Well, glad to be back, Sam. Thank you for having me. It's so much fun to be on the radio with you each morning. Good morning. All right. Common-law leader of Campaign for Liberty. America, land of the not really free. Ron Paul put this column together. It's available at LewRockwell.com. That's a sad but reality-based statement, Lowell.
[00:01:35] Do you mean his title, America, land of the not really free? Well, you're right about that. It's sad but it's real. It's true. I mean, what a sad thing to say about the greatest country on the face of the earth. However, I've got to give him credit. It's a truthful statement, sir. That's true and that's one of the great things Ron Paul does for us. He reminds us, you know, what we should be living under and what we are living under. The two are really quite different. He just mentions two things in this column. One is the income tax and one is the draft.
[00:02:05] But he reminds us that, you know, he was a sponsor of the first bill in Congress that would have eliminated the tax on tips. And removing tax on tips was part of the 2025 bill called the Big Beautiful Bill. You know, that one? Well, you know, it's fascinating about this, Lowell, just to not sidetrack. But so many of Donald Trump's things come from heroes that we've promoted before. Some come from Ron Paul. Some come from Rand Paul. Some come from Judge Napolitano.
[00:02:33] Some come from Pat Buchanan. Some come from and we can just keep going on and on and on about the, you know, pages out of other people's playbooks that Donald Trump has used so successfully. Mm hmm. Yeah. And we're glad that he does whenever he takes some play out of a good guy's playbook and runs with it. That's great. We love that. And so, yeah, it's popular and people are enjoying the benefit of no tax on tips right now because of what?
[00:03:02] Because of Ron Paul, who talked about it for 20 years or so. And he says right here in this column, he says, supporters of the income tax implicitly endorse the idea that our rights are gifts from government and thus can be revoked by government at the will of the rulers. Adoption of the income tax signified the abandonment of the belief that individuals have inalienable rights granted them by the creator. I mean, he just, end of quote, he just lays it out there, Sam.
[00:03:31] And, you know, another aspect of the income tax is the fact that the government has first claim on what you earn via withholding, and then they give part of it back to you, call it a refund. But Ron Paul writes, what normal, but a normal business is, I mean, a normal refund is when a business returns your money if its product or service is not satisfactory. When a thief returns part of what he steals from you, he doesn't call it a refund.
[00:04:00] And yet that's what government calls it. Well, and that's the interesting thing, you get a refund when it's not satisfactory. So if they're giving me a refund, they're admitting that it's not satisfactory at least. Yeah, I suppose so. That's funny. Then Dr. Paul talks about the draft. He says, the draft is the worst example of how the government has rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
[00:04:21] The draft gives government power to force young men and possibly young women to join the military and kill or be killed in a war, end of quote. Now, of course, the U.S. doesn't have a draft right now. I understand that, folks, and so does he. But it does maintain the infrastructure for a draft. We call it the Selected Service Registration System. And, of course, that just makes things easier for the government to reinstate a draft if they're. And we mentioned a week or two ago, too, they made a change in that.
[00:04:50] It used to be to where you had to sign up for it individually, manually, and now it's going to become automatic. So they're moving steps towards the draft, towards forced conscription, even though we're not there yet, Lowell. That's right. And he quotes Ronald Reagan, who said the draft rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. That assumption isn't a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea, end of quote.
[00:05:17] Well, you know what's interesting to me, Sam, is that people nowadays accept the idea that taxes are a necessary evil that must be tolerated. Right? I mean, the idea that government would not exist without taxes and that we must pay our taxes if we're to merit the benefits of law enforcement and legislative bodies and our judicial system. And I just don't buy that. I think much of what government does today could be privatized.
[00:05:41] I also believe that much of what we pay in general taxes could be reduced if it were turned into fees instead, you know, fees for a specific service. And or abortion on taxes and or tariffs. Both of those, neither of them require me to file anything. Yeah. I mean, we as a country flourished for 100 years just without the income tax, right? Without all of these property taxes, without the milieu of sales taxes, right?
[00:06:10] All government needed was that tariffs. And we enjoyed the greatest growth in the history of the world during that time, Sam. Well, and when Ron Paul says, America, land of the not really free, when you literally tax my income as if you have a right to my income before even God does. And then secondly, when you basically tax my property as if, you know, they do business property and, you know, all this kind of stuff as if somehow you own my property.
[00:06:39] And if I don't pay you the taxes, I lose it. So it's not really my property. You got to ask whose property really is it? America, land of the not really free is an apt title for his point, whether it's income tax, whether it's the draft or a litany list that we could continue with. The fact is, it needs to stop. We need to change. And really, the answer is for Americans to stand up and put an end to it.
[00:07:05] Judge Napolitano talking about a secret act of judicial tyranny, Lowell. Yeah, and I never heard about this before, Sam. I think our listeners will be very interested in the subject of his column. It's the shadow docket of the Supreme Court. I never heard of the shadow docket before yesterday, Sam. But Napolitano here talks about it and how it came to be. He starts out with comparing and contrasting realism with originalism.
[00:07:35] And he defines realism as basically the Constitution is only enforceable when the government voluntarily complies with it. He defines originalism as what is basically an understanding of the Constitution that mirrors the understanding that the folks who ratified the Constitution had when they ratified it. And this goes to the real versus the ideal discussion that I teach about a lot. The ideal is the right way. The real is factually where we are.
[00:08:04] Our goal as citizens must be to bring the real closer to the ideal every day. Yeah, absolutely. And so realism is the real and originalism is the ideal. Now, Justice Scalia was the only one, you know, 40 years ago who harbored this view of originalism. And he talked about it. His opinions reflected this view.
[00:08:28] And so over the years, other justices have been born and lived. And now at least two of them, according to Napolitano, are on the bench. You know, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett apparently also hold this view of originalism, right? Looking at the Constitution. Which, by the way, that's the view I hold as well, just to be clear. Me too. Yeah.
[00:08:54] I talk about this every week about the importance of understanding the Constitution, the way the ratifiers viewed it. I mean, not even the writers. I think that's helpful to know what the writers thought about it. But what did the ratifiers think? Because they're the ones who gave it legal force. So I think that's an important distinction to make.
[00:09:16] You know, what was the common understanding of a ratifier at that state convention, right, when in the 13 colonies, right, they ratified that document. That's the important thing, those 13 independent states. Well, it turns out, Sam, that in 2015, this is during the Obama administration, the EPA, which is not part of Congress, basically they legislated. The Clean Energy Plan, they called it. And folks should have gone to prison for that.
[00:09:47] Yeah. Congress had not approved this thing. They did not legislate this thing, but the administration, through the EPA, administered it, right? Now, the EPA is part of the administrative state. And Wilson is the president who came up with the administrative state. So like over 100 years ago, he invented the administrative state in order to – because he didn't think that – yeah.
[00:10:13] Well, he knew that – well, he thought that Congress alone, you know, making all legislation was not practical. And so he went to so-called experts to let them decide the nitty-gritty details of the laws, like the speed limit on the freeways, how many gallons of water should be in your toilet tank, and so forth. Well, Wilson accelerated that – the growth of the administrative state. Yeah, it's called the Chevron deference that is kind of the big key to this, that people need to understand. And we'll take a quick pause, talk about it.
[00:10:43] Chevron deference basically says, hey, you know what? They're out of control, and this must stop. We'll talk about it more in seconds. Lowell Nelson with me, CampaignForLiberty.org. Get involved today, would you please? Cyber crime is exploding. Take Sarah from Sweet Delights, whose world crumbled after having to close with not being able to bounce back. Small businesses are prime targets, but the right strategies can keep yours safe.
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[00:12:36] We're talking about, do you know about the Chevron, or I'm sorry, do you know about the Shadow Docket? And for about 40 years, the Chevron deference courts would allow federal agencies to interpret the laws, even if the court might have interpreted them differently. In 2024, the Supreme Court overturned that rule, and thank heavens, Lowell. I just wanted to highlight that because it directly relates to this, right?
[00:13:06] Yeah, I didn't realize it did, but I think you're right about that. You know, federal law says that administrative regulations are to be challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals. That's an appellate court, the intermediate appellate court. And those regs are not challenged in a federal district court where judges and juries make findings of fact, right? But it's challenged in an appellate court so that the administrative is not required to defend those regulations before a jury
[00:13:35] and before a panel of three appellate judges. So it's really a sweet deal for them. And it was set up this way on purpose so that they wouldn't have to go to the effort of, you know, defending those regulations before a jury or before a panel of judges. Well, Obama's plan was challenged, and we're talking about the Clean Energy Act, right, plan. It was challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The challengers wanted the court to rule quickly. It was back in 2016.
[00:14:04] So they appealed to the Chief Justice Roberts, and he wrote to the other eight vacationing justices and asked them for a vote. Well, four of them joined Roberts' pronouncement that the court could rule on a case not before them, effectively saying that the court could take original jurisdiction whenever he had wanted, in whatsoever case he had wanted. In other words, the court... See, this absolutely upsets the checks and balances
[00:14:32] and literally turns the court into the most powerful of the three branches of government, absolutely against the intent of the Founding Fathers. The court was designed to deal with the redress of grievances, to deal with laws that were unclear, to deal with very special, limited circumstances. This turns that on its head, Law. It's insanity. And these judges who went for that should be impeached on the spot, sir. Yeah, and this was right in our lifetime, Sam, just 10 years ago that this happened.
[00:15:01] Why didn't anything happen to them? Well, why didn't the states speak up, right? Because the states are the ones who should have challenged this. They were the watchdogs, the government, right? If states don't stand up, if people don't stand up, then, you know, bad things happen, and that's what happened here. So we have the shadow docket. It's a variant of judicial tyranny, and that's where we are today. That's the shadow docket, folks. And it's bad.
[00:15:31] It's wrong. But unfortunately, now I know about it. I didn't know about it until last night, Sam. Men and women of the Constitution, stand up. Be bold. Jettison these criminal activities going on under the guise of the color of law. It's pretend legislation. According to the Declaration of Independence, go look it up for yourself if you don't believe me. Martin Armstrong over at LewRockwell.com busts out with an important column, Lowell.
[00:15:55] Yeah, it makes me sad reading his column, Sam, because Zelensky, right, the leader, so-called leader there in Ukraine, he wants draft-aged Ukrainian men to return to his country so they can go to the front lines and fight the Russians. Basically, he's admitting that Ukraine is running out of cannon fodder. They need more soldiers to go die at the front. Quoting him, he says, quote,
[00:16:28] Well, the author of this column, Martin Armstrong, writes that hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded, that millions have fled their homes to escape the war.
[00:16:52] The Western press portrays Zelensky as a heroic figure, but the truth is that he, quote, is a madman prepared to see an entire generation sacrificed to maintain a war that cannot be won, end of quote. Well, millions have fled Ukraine to avoid his tyranny. You see, Sam, Ukraine probably doesn't have a Congress comprised of representatives who have the sole authority to declare war, you know, supposedly like you have here in the U.S.
[00:17:19] Ukraine probably went to war with Russia on the whim of one man named Zelensky. I mean, I didn't go back to research that, but that's probably what happened. So what does Zelensky's call mean to the Ukrainian men of draft age? Well, folks, it means that their lives are secondary to the needs of the state. They are being shamed for protecting their families. When the author then asks a really good question in this column, quote,
[00:17:45] how can any leader claim to represent his people while demanding that they walk back into a war zone? End of quote. It's a darn good question. The only way I know is if you use the media to propagandize and manipulate the truth to the point where people don't really understand the reality of the truth, the reality of the situation, the truth. Yeah. Yeah, this, Sam, I think is full-on tyranny. Now, people, you can go to lewrockwell.com and read the full article.
[00:18:13] And if you do that, then you can see several videos of Zelensky's decree being enforced. I mean, I watched these last night, Sam. It's heartbreaking. One is footage showing a man clinging to a fence as military recruiters beat his hands, beat him over the back with batons, force him onto the ground, then throw him into a van with neighbors arriving too late to intervene. Another video is...
[00:18:39] One of the telltale signs, by the way, of a war, in my opinion, that is a just war, a moral war, a necessary war to defend wives and children and family and homes. And you don't need to force people to do that. Lol. They can see the truth and they'll stand up on their own. And if it's a just, moral, honest, real, necessary obligation, people will rise to that occasion. Absolutely right. People will do that.
[00:19:06] And that's why a volunteer militia, so to speak, is the best way to go. That's what our founders gave us. That's what they believed in. That's what I believe in. And we have to go back to that. Another video on the website there is one of military recruiters chasing down a man in a parking lot area and tossing him into a van. And finally, a video of two vans boxing in a car driven by a fellow who knew what was up and he slammed forward into the rear of the van in front of him.
[00:19:36] The recruiters were trying to break his windows to get at him. He backs up and turns his wheels and finally escapes from between the two vans that were boxing him in. And as he flees, his would-be captors, they draw their weapons and they fire four shots at him as he flees off down the street. So I think he escaped. We even had a video in the United States where one of the soldiers who was forced to go to Iran
[00:20:02] was drug out of a congressional hearing discussion about this. And he said, we don't want to fight for Iran. We don't want to go to war for this and that. And they drug him out and beat him up and broke his arm. And that's happening in America too, Lowell. Yeah, I did not know that, Sam. That's truly sad. I mean, this is a tyrannical government run amok. The reality is leaders of the world are not seeking peace, especially Zelensky. Basically, he rejects every peace opportunity on the table.
[00:20:32] Yeah, that's right. And what we need to do is quit being the funders of it, Lowell. Right. And this article hits close to home to me, Sam, because some of the best engineers on my team at work are Ukrainian. I work with these gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, every day of the work week. And I don't want to see them torn, their families torn apart. I don't want to see them forced to fight a war they don't want to fight.
[00:20:57] And I don't even ask them when I'm on the phone with them or, you know, on a team meeting with them. I used to ask them, you know, how's things going? But they are increasingly reluctant to talk about the war over there because of the oppressive government that they have. They don't want to be, you know, found talking against their government because that just means they'll get arrested and hauled off to some prison. When the people are afraid of their government, we have tyranny. That's for sure, Lowell. Yeah.
[00:21:26] It's a tragic reality. And we've got it coming in here on our own country, Sam. Next and last, or the last story I want to talk about, Sam, was this CEO of Palantir. Is that how you say it? Palantir? Palantir, yeah. Palantir. Anyway, his name is Alex Karp. Well, 10 days ago, folks, he's a CEO of a company right here in America. He summarized a book he had written the year before.
[00:21:54] Now, Palantir, by the way, is a military, is a government and military tech contractor. Well, the CEO of this company posted on X, quote, National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost, end of quote. Well, doesn't this sound a little bit like Zelensky to you?
[00:22:23] Well, if we're going to do that, we need to share the decision-making, too, then, Lowell. Well, you make a good point, a very good point. He goes on and says, quote, National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends are good for business, especially if corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. That was not from Karp.
[00:22:52] That was a quote from Kurt Nemo's article. But if you want another quote from Palantir's CEO, it's down here near the end of the article. Article from Kurt Nemo. Yeah, he says this. Right down here, service to the West. Yeah, for Karp, service to the West includes conscription.
[00:23:18] That is to say, involuntary servitude and the possibility of a violent and horrific death for an untold number of men and women drafted to fight the forever wars envisioned by the billionaire elite. Now, that came from Nemo, too. Where is the quote? Why don't we go ahead and put Karp on the front lines in the Iraq war or Iran war or maybe in the Ukraine war or whatever else? Put that guy on the front lines for a couple of months and then talk to him and see if he's still for it.
[00:23:46] Yeah, you know, Bo Greitz is the only presidential candidate who is willing to do that. I remember his talking about that. And he was willing, he says, look, if we go to war, I'll be on the front lines. I'll be willing to lead them into battle. I don't know if he had any other president doing that, Sam. Amen to that. God bless Truth Teller, Bo Greitz, and others who stand for the sacred constitution of the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen. The checks and balances matter.
[00:24:16] We want the real and the ideal to be the same. And the best way we do that, folks, is we reject judicial tyranny. Realism we reject. Okay? We want original-ism, ladies and gentlemen. In my opinion, that's the way we promote God, family, and country. Well, Nelson, Campaign for Liberty, dot org. Thank you so much, sir. You're welcome, Sam. Thank you.
[00:24:45] God save our republic. Have a great look.